


what desire will make foolish people do

by Heather



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Incest, For Want of a Nail, Hints of Edith having magical powers., Multi, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21785941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather
Summary: What if Edith didn't like tea?
Relationships: Edith Cushing/Lucille Sharpe/Thomas Sharpe, Edith Cushing/Thomas Sharpe, Lucille Sharpe/Thomas Sharpe
Comments: 14
Kudos: 103
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	what desire will make foolish people do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/gifts).



In hindsight, riding down here was not Edith's best idea.

The trouble was, her life had not remotely prepared her for what to do upon discovering that her new husband and sister-in-law were trying to murder her.

It seemed obvious now: how quickly and indecently close to her father's funeral Thomas had proposed, how distant from her he had been ever since their wedding, the harsh-smelling tea that Lucille had tried every minute of every day to push down her throat. Only exhaustive childhood lessons on manners had kept her from refusing it outright, but Edith had always hated the stuff and couldn't bring herself to drink it, pouring it down the drain or out the window when Lucille wasn't looking. That such a silly childhood idiosyncrasy should be what saved her life felt like something out of a dime novel, and that was before you even got to the message from the beyond telling her the tea was poisoned.

Fleeing had been the only thing on Edith's mind, fleeing before they figured out what she knew (if not how she knew it) and tried poisoning her with something else. But her preferred method of flight- slipping out the door on an innocuous errand and never coming back- was completely impossible. In this strange country, a world away from her own, and miles away from anything the lady of a manor house could ever require, on what errand could Edith believably go? A country drive through blood-red snow to the depot for parts for Thomas' infernal machine?

The only choice, it seemed to her, was to slip out of the house when they were busy, by some route which they couldn't easily see, so she'd be miles away before they missed her. And what better choice for that, considering where they had trapped her, than to take the elevator down into the bowels of that red, red earth and slip out through the mines?

All very brilliant on paper, but now she was stuck in a rusting elevator halfway between the rotting house and the gutted grounds, with no hope of rescue but from two people who meant to murder her for money, and no possible innocent explanation of _why_ she had been in the elevator headed for the mines in the first place. 

Edith had never felt more foolish in her life. If she died here and now, she was sure she'd find herself the most embarrassed ghost of Crimson Peak.

She reached over, half-hearted, and tried to get the stuck lever to move in either direction. She got nothing more than a metallic groan of protest and a nerve-wracking shudder of the cables for her trouble.

She hugged her knees against her chest. She'd think of something. She just needed more time, was all.

Upstairs, Edith could hear the creak of the stairs, loud as a scream, under the sound of pounding feet and hissing, angry voices.

"How could you possibly lose her?" This from Lucille, snarling with anger. 

" _I_ lost her?" Thomas, voice wrought with laughter that had been squeezed through misery and sarcasm. "Keeping her abed was your responsibility, Lucille- if you've told me once, you've told me a thousand times to leave it all to you." 

Lucille wasn't ready to give in. "This was _your_ choice of bride. You picked her out, you brought her home- you should have some idea of where she might have gone!"

"Well, I don't," Thomas said, flatter this time, more sullen, as though he took the blame to heart. "Anyway, if she's cottoned onto what's happening, we don't have time to look for her. We ought to leave before we're run out of England by an angry mob."

"Leave?" Lucille sounded incredulous. "Don't be absurd!"

"You're the one having hysterics because she stepped out of bed," Thomas said. "If being reported to the authorities is what you're worried about, then we shouldn't wait for that to happen. We should go now."

 _Leave,_ Edith's heart practically pounded the word out in her chest. If they left, she might be able to contrive some way out of here and still get free. They wouldn't look for her if they thought she had already escaped. She still had a chance if they went. 

_Oh God,_ she prayed, _please, please, let them run away and leave me be._

Above her, Lucille made a dismissive snort, as though what Thomas said was beneath consideration. "We'll find the little bitch," she said at last. "She's gummed to the gills on arsenic. She couldn't have got far."

"You didn't think she was sick enough," Thomas said. "What if she hasn't been drinking it? What if she's made it halfway across the county by now?"

"She hasn't," Lucille said, softly hissing.

"I don't think we should take chances," he said. "I think we should each pack a bag, split up- we'll meet somewhere—"

"I said she hasn't!" Lucille shouted. "Start looking. Find her. She's still here. I can smell it."

Thomas sighed. "Lucille."

"I'll start in the attic," she said. "You check the grounds." The stairs began to pound and creak again. Lucille had run off to look without letting Thomas finish whatever it was he meant to say. Edith could hear Thomas letting out a desolate sigh.

Against her better judgment, she scooted along the floor of the elevator, trying to peer around, to get a glimpse of him. Why, she wasn't sure, other than whatever foolish, treacherous part of her still loved him wanting to look at his face one last time. She tried to shake it off- no expression on his face now could ever make up for this, and it was idiotic to even hope. And seeing him would mean risking him seeing her, which was unthinkable.

She still reached up and through the bars to grab the floor ahead of her.

 _Just one look,_ she thought. She just needed one look and then she'd let him go forever. Whatever lies he'd told her, Edith's love had been real. Didn't it deserve proper burial?

As if to punish her for this line of thinking, the elevator plunged down another foot or so with a loud clang. Edith clapped both hands over her mouth to muffle a scream. 

Thomas whipped round at the noise, charging in the elevator's direction. 

Edith's heart pounded wildly in her chest and she started jumping up and down as fast as she could, trying to force the elevator to fall again. At the moment, she didn't care if the elevator killed her; not as badly as she didn't want to be killed by Thomas, anyway.

He pressed his face against the bars at the top of the shaft and hissed, surprisingly soft, "Edith? Is that you?"

She drew a breath and held it. Perhaps if he didn't hear her—

"Are you mad?" he whisper-shouted at the top of the shaft. "What are you doing?"

Edith glanced slowly up. He was looking right at her.

"Are you stuck?" he asked.

"Stay away!" Edith said. "I- I have a knife!" She winced. She could not have sounded less convincing than if she had tried to make a knife shape of her fingers in her pocket and pointed it at him. She swallowed and tried again. "Don't come any closer!"

Thomas started working to pry the gate apart.

"Stop!" Edith said. "Leave me alone!"

"Will you please quiet down?" he asked. "She'll hear." The gates came apart with some grunting effort on Thomas' part and he began to climb down the elevator cable.

Edith pondered the possibility of throwing herself around the elevator again, shaking it around and getting him to fall. She couldn't be sure it would kill him, but he would certainly be hurt, maybe hurt enough that she would be able to climb out the way he was coming down and run to freedom.

Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because Thomas stopped to regard her with sober warning and shook his head. "Don't try it," he said. "You don't want me to leave you alone with her."

Slowly, Edith sat on the floor, and waited.

When Thomas reached the top of the elevator, he opened an emergency hatch in its ceiling, then shimmied down into it with her. He was crouched low, hands spread out to the sides, like a bank robber trapped by the police. "May I sit?" he asked.

The absurdity of this ask felt like something cracking inside Edith's chest. A lump swelled in her throat and she choked out, "You were planning to kill me."

Thomas let out a heavy sigh and sat across from her. "We were," he said. He gave Edith a piercing look. "Does that make you feel better to hear? That it wasn't your imagination?"

Edith wanted to lash out at him, to scream, to dig her nails into his face like claws and rip his eyes out. Instead, she breathed out, "Why?"

"We needed the money," Thomas said. "My mother, my father- they left us with nothing, Edith." He rose to his knees and reached for her hands.

Edith pressed herself back against the back of the elevator as hard as she could.

Thomas seemed to realize as she did it that he deserved that reaction and sat down again on the other side. "It's inelegant, I know, as a motive for murder."

"Inelegant?" Edith repeated, staring.

"Unworthy," he tried. "Not very noble or impressive, just on its face—"

Edith clenched her jaw to keep it from dropping. "Are you trying to make murder out to be some sort of- social faux pas?" 

"I'm trying to say that I know that it's dreadful," Thomas said. "That you have every right to hate and fear and be disgusted by me and by Lucille, but I want you to understand- we were barely more than children and we were starving, and when we had nothing left to sell...."

"You what?" Edith asked. "Sold yourself?"

"I tried to," Thomas said. He shifted uncomfortably. "When I wed the first time- Pamela- I—" He rubbed the bridge of his nose as if saying her name pained him. "I didn't plan to murder her. I thought that she and I would remain married, that her fortune would be enough to care for Lucille and me, but Lucille couldn't stand it." He moved his hand to squeezing the nape of his neck. "She had thought, when she chose her- being so old and wheelchair-bound- that Pamela wouldn't have desire for me. That my marriage to her would be no different from caring for a maiden aunt." He bit his lip. "It wasn't Pamela's fault. She wanted nothing more than what all wives want from their husbands. But I- couldn't. And Lucille thought she was protecting me."

A long silence stretched between them.

"And then what?" Edith finally asked. "You realized that murder was an easy way to solve your problems?"

"It wasn't easy," Thomas said. "It was never easy. Not with Pamela or Margaret or Enola or your father. And certainly never with you." He reached for her hand again. This time, Edith let him take it. "I never loved any of them. I never told any of them." He hesitated. "But I am telling you."

"Because you love me," Edith said. She wanted to sound disadainful and cutting. She thought she probably sounded pathetic and sad. And tired. So very, very tired.

"Is that so hard to believe?" he asked.

Edith let out a hollow laugh. "Should it be easy to believe you, after what you've just confessed to?" 

He stroked the back of her hand with both of his thumbs, as though trying to massage an impression of his own trustworthiness into her skin. "Is it easier to believe I'm telling you this to convince you of a lie? That for some ghoulish reason, I want you to die pitying me and clinging to a false sense of my love?"

Edith tried to pull her hand away, but he was still holding it tight. "Since when?" she asked.

Thomas frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

Edith took a moment to compose herself before trying to continue. Thomas using social niceties in _this_ of all conversations felt like it might break her. "Since when have you loved me?" she asked. 

Thomas was silent for a moment. Edith could see the gears turning in his mind, trying to churn out an answer that could possibly still salvage this. There were no right answers here and there were many possible wrong ones. Edith didn't want to hear that he had been moved by her beauty in the rain the night of the McMichaels' party, or how perfectly they fit when they danced, whirling together with the candle never going out. Any of those would have felt like a lie, part of Thomas' con for her hand and all the money that came with it. Anything that had happened since their marriage would be even worse: grotesque and disgusting, built in the context of his committing to the plot to murder her. Once they were married, anything of her that was precious to him could only have become precious because he knew how scarce it was, how little time it- and she- had left.

Maybe she couldn't think of an answer she'd like because there just wasn't one that could suffice.

Thomas ran one of his hands through his hair. "I want to say it was your book," he said. "The yearning you wrote about, the loneliness. It felt as though you knew me. As though you had known me from the beginning of time itself, and captured perfectly in words the desolation I had felt every day as a child." He swallowed. "And many... many days since."

 _If our positions were reversed,_ Edith thought, _I think I would have to confess it was his eyes that had done it._ Those sad blue-grey eyes that always seemed an instant away from tears, even when he was happy. They were working overtime on her now.

"It- spoke to me." Thomas tried to smile at her, which made the sad eyes ever so much worse. "Despite your flagrant and appalling abuse of the semicolon."

"Do you really think you ought to be criticizing my puncutation right now?" Edith asked, trying very hard to muffle a laugh that she wouldn't have thought herself capable of a mere moment ago.

"Probably not," Thomas said, "but you really could use a proofreader for the book. When you finish it."

"'When'?" Edith asked. It came out more biting than she had thought it would, which made her feel a little stronger. He may have been playing her heartstrings, but at least she still had some will to fight for herself. To not soften her tone for the man who would be her murderer.

"Of course 'when,'" Thomas said. "Unless you don't mean to finish it?"

"I thought we were here because you and Lucille didn't mean for me to finish it," she said.

"Do you really think I would have come all the way down here and told you all this if I didn't want you to finish it?" he asked. "If you finishing that book hadn't become the most important thing in the world to me?" He tightened his grip on her hand.

"How do you expect me to forgive you?" Edith asked, tired and hollow. The truth was, she didn't want to be asking that. She didn't want to be thinking that. She almost hoped that he actually had some kind of answer.

"I don't expect that you will," Thomas said. "I merely hope that you can."

It wasn't a magical answer that fixed everything. But, she supposed, it was a start.

"Will you help me back upstairs?" Edith said. "I seem to have gotten myself trapped."

Thomas smiled, his first genuine smile since they had left New York. Looking at it now, Edith couldn't believe that she had ever fallen for the other. The difference was stark. And, perhaps, a very small bit magical.

"I would like nothing more, Lady Sharpe," he said, "than to help you back upstairs."

Whatever was wrong with the elevator, Thomas didn't have to tinker with it very much or very long before it started taking them back up. The elevator coughed, whirred, and groaned back to life before it began to take them up towards freedom. And up towards Lucille.

Edith sneaked a look at Thomas. Though his hands were still, his face was replete with anxiety: his teeth sunk into his lower lip, his eyes haunted by a creeping despair. Edith found it comforting. Calm would've felt deceptive, as though he were planning to hand her over to Lucille when they reached the top. His quiet terror felt to her like he didn't intend to give her up without a fight.

 _Would it have to be a fight,_ Edith wondered, _or do we have other choices available?_

The elevator came to a halt.

Like a monster in a story, Lucille was standing there waiting for them.

Edith heard Thomas' breath hitch with a small touch of panic. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his fingers twitch and his hands shake. 

Lucille saw it, too. "Thomas," she said, her voice cold, quiet, and perhaps most peculiar of all, wounded. Her hand was closed into a fist by her heart, as though he had struck her there.

"Lucille," he said. He sounded both wary and pleading. Fearful of her like a dangerous animal and submitting to her like to an angry god.

Edith reached over and took Thomas' hand. Both of the Sharpes jumped in startlement when she did it. 

"Lucille," Edith said, keeping her voice as calm and easy as she could. (And why not? She conquered monsters by the paragraph every day.) "Thomas and I need to talk to you."

Lucille looked down at their joined hands. Though her eyes were cold, her lip seemed to quiver. Whatever else Lucille was, she was hurt and afraid. "Fine," she said. "Let's talk."

\- - -

When they made it to the dining room, Lucille and Edith sat across from each other on that stupidly long table like the generals of two opposing armies in a long and bloody war. Thomas remained standing, off to the side, slightly nearer to Edith but still mainly by the center of the table. This had the drawback of making it so Edith could not hold his hand, but then, it also meant that Lucille couldn't see him grab on. Treating him like something that still belonged to both of them, that they were neither of them very sure they could find a way to share.

Edith wondered if either of them even really wanted exclusive use of him anymore.

Lucille fixed her with a cool expression, detached almost to the point of vacancy. "You wanted to talk. So talk."

Edith wasn't sure where to start. "I know that you've been trying to poison me," she tried.

Lucille looked neither surprised nor concerned by this. "I see." Her eyes narrowed into a piercing gaze, studying Edith like a painting with something hidden inside. "How quickly did you figure it out?"

Edith considered whether she ought to say that she didn't figure it out, that the ghost of Enola Sciotti had told her through wax cylinder recordings, and she was willing to take a ghost's word for it. All things being equal, it seemed only fair to acknowledge Enola's contribution to saving her life. Then again, Edith couldn't see a good reason for Lucille to be asking. "So you'll know better with the next one?" she asked. "No, Lucille. I don't think so."

Lucille's lips thinned, but she said nothing. "What do you want, then?" 

The idea of "wanting" anything had not occurred to Edith, at least not in those terms. She had no intention of asking for Lucille's blessing on her marriage, or for Lucille's permission to keep Thomas as her own. She wouldn't beg for her life or her freedom, and she refused to buy it, either. If Lucille Sharpe wanted her money or her husband, she would have to say as much, not wait for Edith to ask as though those things were a foregone conclusion and it was all already Lucille's own to decide to give. 

Edith leveled her gaze and tried to affect just as much coolness. "You can't have my father's money," she said.

Lucille shot Thomas a brief look, like a guest to a dog's master after the dog has trodden mud on the carpets. Seeing no help from that quarter, she looked back to Edith. "I wasn't the one who chose your father's money, you know. Thomas was the one who insisted it had to be you."

Off in his place to the side, Thomas' back tensed and his head bowed, avoiding either woman's gaze. Edith could read his confession in the line of his shoulders: _guilty as charged._

"Thomas wasn't after the money," Edith said, with a certainty she didn't feel, taking a chance that it was true. "It was me he wanted."

Lucille's lips pursed in disgust. "And how do you suppose he expected that to work out?"

"I suppose he thought that I'd win you over," she said. She looked at Thomas without really seeing him. There was an ethereal sort of coolness in the air, like the feeling that a ghost was nearby but without the sight of any ghosts. Edith could feel some strange sense of Knowing in her mind, in her heart. She could feel the shapes of things she shouldn't know, couldn't know, forming answers on her lips without the faintest of ideas where they came from. "I suppose he thought that, once you had me, once you had to care for me, once you came to know me, you would come to love me. Like he did. Like he does."

It was hard to say which one looked more spooked, Thomas or Lucille. They were both staring at her as though they could feel what she was feeling and on some level, they trembled to behold it. 

Lucille sounded fearful when she replied. "I have never, for even the briefest of moments, been in love with you."

But that wasn't true, and Edith knew it. She saw, for the first time through Lucille's eyes, that day in the park when they sat side by side, watching the butterflies die. Lucille had looked on her then as naive and innocent. As precious. As something that, in that moment, she wanted to consume for herself. 

Edith's wedding ring was Lucille's. It had been given to her by Thomas... from Lucille.

She was barely aware of getting up from her side of the table to float over to Lucille's. But she was very, very aware of her own hand touching Lucille's hair, brushing it back from her face. She saw her own hand like someone else's reach down and pick up Lucille's. Her skin was cold as a corpse's. But Edith's was barely warmer. 

Both of their hands were warmed from the touch of the ring. 

Thomas was watching them warily, stepping toward them with the caution one might use to approach an injured wolf or a sleeping bear. "If you kill her, Lucille," he said, just a hair above a whisper, "whatever else you might feel, this all starts again. We do this again and again, forever." He looked at their joined hands with a palpable awe that made Edith momentarily afraid of what they were about to become. She could feel it- in the shapes and shadows of things she knew but was not meant to know, she could feel a light of purpose in the dark. She could feel what she had no other word for but destiny.

"She's our chance to be free, Lucille," Thomas said. "I think- I think she's the only one we're going to get."

Lucille looked at Edith with a desolate sadness, an absence that had developed inside a void she'd been alone in. She looked broken. She looked like she had the morning Thomas and Edith had returned from the depot, their marriage consummated, the very air itself alive with this Knowing in Lucille that some fundamental shift had happened and made all of this more Edith's than hers.

Edith couldn't speak to what compelled her to do it, only that she felt she must. She tipped her head and kissed Lucille softly on the lips. She felt, rather than saw, Thomas come up behind Lucille and begin to massage her shoulders as they kissed. The touch of his hands on her skin seemed to push Lucille over into kissing Edith like her life depended on it, like all of her breath and life lived inside Edith's kiss. Her hands were in Edith's hair.

Edith drew back and laid her face against Lucille's, and made a promise she knew she would never be able to bring herself to break. "You'll never be alone again."

Lucille's face dropped from Edith's to nestle between her breasts, kissing there. Breathing her in. Lucille's fingers fumbled against the fabric of Edith's dressing gown until she could feel her nipple through it. She stroked it with her thumb, bit it with her teeth, held on tight. Thomas was on his knees on the floor between them now, kissing Edith's thigh first, then Lucille's.

All around them, the house groaned and shrieked, floors and doors and windows and stairs all protesting. Edith pulled back from the two of them for a moment, looked around, and realized: it wasn't just the regrets and misdeeds of the past that kept Thomas and Lucille trapped in this, trapped in here. 

They both looked at her, anxious, waiting to see what she Knew.

"We have to change it," Edith said.

\- - - 

Where Thomas managed to acquire so much kerosene, Edith had no idea, but she couldn't find it in her to care. 

They poured them wildly on every surface in the house, soaking the carpets, streaking the windows. The scent made Edith feel faint, but the purpose of it all made her feel powerful, too. Whatever Other thing lurked in the shadows here, she could feel that it was watching and it was afraid. 

Lucille felt it, too, taking unprecedented zeal in the destruction, not only pouring the kerosene out, but smashing item after item into the puddles with growls and screams like she was fighting for her life. Or, Edith realized with some mild embarrassment, as though she were very near to _la petite mort._

Thomas seemed to be going about with the silent determination of one who has committed to their course of action, but does not entirely understand it. Edith could see in his eyes, in the grumblesome turn of his lip, that he wanted to ask what the point of all this was, would it not be enough to just go very far away and pretend they never heard of Allerdale Hall?

The answer was no. As long as it stood, coming back here, coming back to this, would always be an option.

Edith wouldn't allow that option to exist anymore.

Neither of the Sharpes hesitated to smash and pour over every single extant possession of their father's. Their mother's portrait only involved a little more hesitation.

"Do you think we owed more to her than this?" Thomas asked.

Edith shook her head. "I think this is her chance to be free, too."

Thomas turned the portrait around so she couldn't look at them while he poured the kerosene down the canvas' back.

The first thing to give Lucille pause was much harder for Edith to understand what it was about. She had a drawer with locks of ladies' hair, neatly braided and tied up with a ribbon. Edith caught her fingering them all with an obvious sense of melancholy, her eyes drawn away to that far off place. 

Edith tried to keep her voice calm, gentle. Loving. "What are they?"

Lucille shook her head. "Relics of another life, I suppose." The locks seemed to hurt her just to look at. Their destruction seemed to pain her beyond expression.

She hesitated. Edith was not at all sure that she should be making this offer- it didn't feel like it fit in with what they were meant to be doing, with what they were trying to do- but she couldn't help herself. Lucille looked miserable, and through some kind of higher calling, Edith felt compelled to care. "Do you want to keep them?"

Lucille's hand on the braids stilled for a moment, squeezing them all with a feverish sort of possession. Edith could read in the grim lines of her face the thought: _They're mine, they belonged to me, this was all that ever did—_

But then she let them go.

"No," she said, dropping her hand to her side. "It doesn't matter anymore." She pulled the drawer from the bureau wholesale, dumped the contents on the floor, and saturated them, too.

Edith felt like a merciless god receiving a sacrifice as beloved as Isaac. With how badly she didn't want it, she thought she might have preferred a ram, too.

She and Lucille stood in silence for a moment, surrounded by shattered things about to be burned. Edith stretched out her hand. Lucille took it.

Thomas looked at them solemnly through a doorframe. "We should go," he said. 

Lucille nodded. "We'll light it on the way out."

They did.

\- - -

The burning of Allerdale Hall could be seen for miles. Edith was sure that the story would be told by everyone in the village for generations to come. 

They slipped through the woods on foot, the conflagration behind them lighting their way. Edith watched the ground as they went, watched their bloody footprints in the snow slowly give way to normal earthen ones. It was quiet now. She felt like she had purged a wound.

Lucille had so far not looked back. She looked as though she dearly wanted to, but was resisting. "What will become of us now?" she asked. She didn't sound as though she had much expectation of an answer.

"I don't know," Edith said. 

Thomas wrapped an arm first around his sister, then the other around his wife, and held them close to his chest.

Edith sank into it, into him and Lucille, and thought that not knowing felt strangely like hope.


End file.
